The following is an extended explanation of my idea in how the actual rating system can improve; the goal of this is to lower down the amount of threads at the forum complaining and asking why their skins got a low rating.
Stars 2.0
One of the common arguments about the actual rating system is the “why I got a low rate?”; right now when you submit a skin at any gallery your work will be rated by a moderator, this person will even decide if your work is good enough or suitable to enter into the gallery, in fact, this procedure is quite necessary and it doesn’t need to change at all, we can consider that like the “start point” to begin the rating. Now, how should we rate in the correct way? My idea is quite simple:
To prevent skinners fury we can replace the little window showing the amount of stars to rate the skin with two things: at the top right side of the skinner description of the skin it could be a star-meter, just to show the rating the skin has. The other part is at the comments area: in there aside the guy/gal name it will appear the rate he/she gave to the skin and comment will be the reason of the amount of the stars he/she gave. Now, you will ask your self how in the name of God we can make that person to leave a comment and not just the rate? It’s simple, during the procedure of rating a comment it “must” be added a comment to apply the rate, if not it won’t let the user to apply any star at all. If a user rates any skin just righting some useless words or typing anything in a random way without any sense, the skinner can request to undo the rate and delete the comment. All this can be done just by making a pop-up window to appear (we can even add an edit button to leave the option open if the user want to change the rate or the comment he/she did). By doing this we can even prevent other users to spam or put a low rating just to damage the skinner work.
2. - Hide the troll.
A plus to this idea is to add a “hide” button in every comment that can be use only by the owner of the skin, this is to leave the option of hiding useless comments with a low rating or other kind of comments that the skinner might consider unnecessary.
3. - Flaming stars!
Other thing that it might be good is to give to the skin the honor of “flaming star”; it is something like a popular skin thing. A skin can get the title of flaming star when it gets more than 20 or 10 five star ratings (given by users).
I don’t remember who are able to rate and who doesn’t, but to me, the only ones who must rate a skin are the Master Apprentice, Journeyman and Masters. Why of this? Not only because they are at certain point experts on what they do, they also make a great effort to make this site even better in many ways.
And that is all.., I really hope my idea(s) could be considered and be applied…
TYCUS,
Thank you for putting together this very detailed ratings proposal. And thanks to everyone so far for the overall discussion. These are the threads I want to see about site issues like the ratings system. Reasoned discussion with new ideas as opposed to rants and complaints.
Because it's what I do best, I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a minute on the proposed points. Basically, whenever we look at a new system or a change to any system for user feedback, we have to look at it both from the warm fuzzy side, and from the potentially negative side.
1. Rate a skin, leave a comment...
There are a few problems I see here. One is the already addressed issue of either junk comments or very negative comments being left on a skin. I'll be honest here, I get a lot more complaints about mean comments on a skin than I do a low rating. A rating dropping by half a star is a lot less personal than someone coming on and saying "THIS SKIN IS GARBAGE!" Despite the complaints, I've seen more people talk about giving up skinning over negative comments than I have over a low score.
Next is the problem where you'll be able to tell exactly who dropped your score. Even if they leave a glowing comment, it won't take a rocket scientist to figure out overall who gave the skin a low score. This will create a great deal of conflict where none currently exists. Having ratings be essentially anonymous (admins can see who rated what how, but users can't) lets people express honest opinions of a skin without fear of retribution.
Counter idea:
When rating a skin, you have to pick one pre-defined reason from a drop-down menu. Reasons could be things like "I love the skin!" "I don't like the colors" "It doesn't run on my PC" "It's not my style" "Very usable" etc. With options depending on what score you gave the skin (so you can't give a skin a 1 star rating and say you loved it).
2. Hide the Troll
Not all negative comments are trolling. If someone posts an absolutely terrible skin, people should be able to call it like they see it. Now, there are genuinely negative comments sometimes that serve no purpose and are just insulting, offensive and detract from the site. But we don't want to create a system where only glowing praise is allowed. There are users on DeviantArt, for example, who delete every single comment on their skin that is in any way not complete praise, including reports of skins not working.
On Digg, every user can give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to any given comment on an article. Each user can only rate a comment once. Once a comment passes below a certain threshold score, it is collapsed to one line showing the date, time and username, and a button to expand said comment. It is never deleted, never hidden, and always accessible. This allows the community as a whole to determine if a comment is appropriate, and doesn't leave it up to the whim of an individual skinner who may not want any criticism of any kind.
3. Flaming Stars
I've got nothing against this idea. I love it. The mechanics behind it would probably need some tweaking (like make it a combination of downloads & ratings). We have "Hot topics" on the forums already to indicate popular/very active threads, I like this as a method to single out skins. I'll have to think more on this one to see how we'd possibly do it. It could be a nice way to automatically feature very popular community content.
4. Who Can Rate
It's going to stay at the current cutoff. Apprentices are generally skinners too, and as creators of content they have the authority to rate other skins. Subscribers are supporting the site and community by helping foot the bill, generally if they're going to sink the cash into the site, they're not the types to do meaningless drive-by ratings, they're very active skinning users who know what they like.
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